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Working backwards, customer centricity, etc. etc. from their principles and they couldn’t figure out this was going to be a dud? Maybe it’s cost prohibitive to

Working backwards, customer centricity, etc. etc. from their principles and they couldn’t figure out this was going to be a dud? Maybe it’s cost prohibitive to produce something like this robot at tiny scale, but it seems like the best way to develop would be to identify a few partner businesses, super serve them well and then sell to general public. Stripe is famous for developing products that way. E.g. stripe subscriptions were built in concert with Atlasian and other companies, then released to everybody [1]. To be fair, maybe that’s what they are doing with their home product. And to be doubly fair, building a subscription billing product is far more straightforward than introducing a new category. [1] https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-a-culture-of-excellence-david-singleton-cto-of-stripe/ https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-a-culture-of-excellen...

teaearlgraycold 2y ago
> Stripe is famous for developing products that way. E.g. stripe subscriptions were built in concert with Atlasian and other companies, then released to everybody They’re just using the standard startup playbook here
- ec109685 2y ago
  Yes, that’s why surprising Amazon isn’t for these niche products.
hbosch 2y ago
>Working backwards, customer centricity, etc. etc. from their principles and they couldn’t figure out this was going to be a dud? As someone who worked inside Amazon, the LPs and particular "customer obsession" are quite a lot more malleable than they might appear. For example, a PM might pitch "ads by default in Prime Video" as quote-unquote customer obsessed because ads inform customers about products that they could use. Just a hypothetical scenario of course.
- chillfox 2y ago
  I just yesterday logged into Prime video after not having used it for a while and saw that they added ads. I went straight to Amazon and cancelled my prime subscription.
nextworddev 2y ago
ex-AWS here. No, plenty of projects get built and released without a truly rigorous working backwards process. PRFAQs (working backwards document) do get written, but wouldn't say PMs and GMs always have the highest bar for being evidence driven.

teaearlgraycold 2y ago

> Stripe is famous for developing products that way. E.g. stripe subscriptions were built in concert with Atlasian and other companies, then released to everybody They’re just using the standard startup playbook here

ec109685 2y ago
Yes, that’s why surprising Amazon isn’t for these niche products.

hbosch 2y ago

>Working backwards, customer centricity, etc. etc. from their principles and they couldn’t figure out this was going to be a dud? As someone who worked inside Amazon, the LPs and particular "customer obsession" are quite a lot more malleable than they might appear. For example, a PM might pitch "ads by default in Prime Video" as quote-unquote customer obsessed because ads inform customers about products that they could use. Just a hypothetical scenario of course.

chillfox 2y ago
I just yesterday logged into Prime video after not having used it for a while and saw that they added ads. I went straight to Amazon and cancelled my prime subscription.

nextworddev 2y ago

ex-AWS here. No, plenty of projects get built and released without a truly rigorous working backwards process. PRFAQs (working backwards document) do get written, but wouldn't say PMs and GMs always have the highest bar for being evidence driven.